Where Liberalism Is Alive and Well!

Day: May 10, 2010

When you step back and look at the Republican Party over the last two years, it looks very much like a fourth grade classroom. As the party of “nuh uh”, they look like they are just playing the opposite game, you know, the one where the pest in the class says the opposite of everything you say. This phenomenon has caused many Republicans to contort their positions and actually attack bills that they themselves were sponsors of and in some cases actually wrote. If that isn’t an example of a juvenile game, I’m not sure what is. I posted about the critics of the Obama administration (through Politico) who tried there hardest to make the BP Oil spill President Obama’s Katrina. Without any real knowledge of what the administration was doing, the reich-wing cooked up the “Obama’s Katrina” narrative, even though everyone with any knowledge of what was happening knew it clearly wasn’t true. The AP went fishing for a story to that effect and found out the truth. From a story at Huffington Post.

This came from Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.: “The American people deserve to know why the administration was slow to respond, why necessary equipment was not immediately on hand in the area and why the president did not fully deploy Cabinet-level federal officials” to the Gulf Coast until April 30.

There is so much wrong with that statement including the truth, but what strikes me is that apparently he is saying that the federal government should have had equipment on hand and in the area in case a private Oil Company (British), should have an accident. Isn’t that some form of socialism, when the government is meddling with private businesses? Now maybe he is saying the government should have shifted all the resources of the federal government to get “necessary” (whatever the fuck that means) equipment in the area “immediately”. Now considering this accident is unprecedented and all the greatest minds in our country are trying to figure out how to stop the flow, maybe Mike Pence can tell us what “necessary” equipment he is talking about. Here is the AP’s conclusion followed by some details of exactly what the Obama administration did…

While the Obama administration has faced second-guessing about the speed and effectiveness of some of its actions, a narrative pieced together by The Associated Press, based on documents, interviews and public statements, shows little resemblance to Katrina in either the characterization of the threat or the federal government’s response…

…Before noon the next day at the Interior Department, which oversees offshore drilling projects, the department’s No. 2 official, Deputy Secretary David Hayes, raced to grab a commercial jet for New Orleans without even time to pack a bag. He sets up shop at a government command center already monitoring events.

“We obviously knew this was a bad situation,” Hayes said in a recent interview. “But we were not in a mindset where we thought we were dealing with a major oil spill.”

And you know this was before the spill started, he went down there immediately when it was just an explosion and loss of life, which warranted a response from the Administration, if only these people had been around when Katrina happened instead of Ole’ Brownie. More details about the response, suck on it Mike Pence…

Two days after the fire erupted, Obama convened an Oval Office meeting to get the latest on what still was viewed largely as a major accident and rescue effort – 11 workers could not be found.

He asked departments to respond aggressively to help in the rescue and assess the environmental fallout. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in a statement called the response “the No. 1 priority.”

A team representing 16 agencies and offices that included the Pentagon, the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Interior and Homeland Security was formed. As a precaution, 100,000 gallons of chemicals to break up oil on the waster was sent to three Gulf Coast locations.

The next bit of juvenile behavior I’ll point out is the idea that we no longer mirandize American citizens accused of a crime. In 1966, the Supreme Court set out guidelines for what must be said to someone who is arrested. I won’t paste them here, everyone knows them if they ever watched Dragnet or Adam 12. All civilized countries have similar guidelines or laws that are meant to protect the rights of their citizens, you know those basic human rights that the Republican Party no longer support. I just heard one of the biggest village idiots within the Republican party, Rudy Giuliani, on “This Week with Jake Tapper” express that idea as clearly as any. They believe that giving rights to anyone is giving rights to terrorists, it’s black and white to them. It’s similar to the people who don’t have a problem with stopping Latinos in Arizona, they don’t see how American citizens will lose rights under the plan. As long as they don’t think it will directly affect them, they are cool with taking away other people’s rights. That is exactly why the founding fathers put habeas corpus right in the main text of the Constitution.